Unhealthy Fixation The war against genetically

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Unhealthy Fixation

The war against genetically modified organisms is full of fear mongering, errors, and fraud. Labeling them will not make you safer.

I'm not going to belabor you with the entire list of counter-arguments, I'm just 'pasting' the 'money shots' together with the link.

By William Saletan

1 They Want You to Be Overwhelmed

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_scie...rrors.html

5 A Legitimate Concern

Up to this point, we’ve been focusing on health concerns about GMOs. The stories of papaya, Bt, and Golden Rice demonstrate, in several ways, that these concerns are unfounded.

One thing we’ve learned is that fear of GMOs is unfalsifiable. Hundreds of studies have been done, and tons of GE food have been eaten. No amount of evidence will convince the doomsayers that GMOs are safe. You can’t live your life clinging to such unappeasable fear. Let it go.

Another thing we’ve learned is that it makes no sense to avoid GMOs based on standards that nobody applies to non-GMO food.

Yes, it’s conceivable that you could overdose on vitamin A or ingest a viral or insecticidal protein from eating fruits, grains, or vegetables. But GMOs don’t make any of these scenarios more likely or more dangerous.

In fact, if you look at illness or direct fatalities—or at correlations between food sales and disease trends, which anti-GMO activists like to do—you can make a better case against organic food than against GMOs.


A third lesson is that GMO segregation, in the form of labels or GMO-free restaurants, is misguided. GMO labels don’t clarify what’s in your food.

They don’t address the underlying ingredients—pesticides, toxins, proteins—that supposedly make GMOs harmful. They stigmatize food that’s perfectly safe, and they deflect scrutiny from non-GMO products that have the same disparaged ingredients.


The people who push GMO labels and GMO-free shopping aren’t informing you or protecting you. They’re using you. They tell food manufacturers, grocery stores, and restaurants to segregate GMOs, and ultimately not to sell them, because people like you won’t buy them.

They tell politicians and regulators to label and restrict GMOs because people like you don’t trust the technology. They use your anxiety to justify GMO labels, and then they use GMO labels to justify your anxiety. Keeping you scared is the key to their political and business strategy. And companies like Chipotle, with their non-GMO marketing campaigns, are playing along.

But safety isn’t the only concern that’s been raised about GMOs. There are other criticisms, and one of them is worth your attention. It addresses the world’s most common agricultural application of genetic engineering: herbicide tolerance.


Three-quarters of the corn and cotton grown in this country is engineered to resist insects. These crops have the bacterial Bt gene, which makes them lethal to bugs that eat them. Slightly more than that, about 80 percent to 85 percent of corn and cotton, is engineered to withstand weed-killing chemicals, especially glyphosate, which is sold as Roundup. (The two traits are usually packaged together.) The percentages are similar for soy. Worldwide, insect-resistant crops are grown on about 50 percent of the land allotted to GMOs, while herbicide-tolerant crops are grown on more than 80 percent.


Both applications are considered pesticidal, because weeds, like bugs, are pests. And this is crucial to understanding the debate over whether GMOs, as a whole, have raised or lowered the level of pesticide use.

One study, published in 2012 by Charles Benbrook, the most sensible critic of GMOs, calculates that GMOs increased pesticide use in the United States by 7 percent. An international analysis of multiple studies, published last year, calculates that GMOs decreased pesticide use by 37 percent.

But the two assessments agree on a fundamental distinction: While bug-resistant GMOs have led to lower use of insecticides, herbicide-tolerant GMOs have led to higher use of weedkillers.

Two factors seem to account for the herbicide increase. One is direct: If your crops are engineered to withstand Roundup, you can spray it profusely without killing them. The other factor is indirect: When every farmer sprays Roundup, weeds adapt to a Roundup-saturated world. They evolve to survive. To kill these herbicide-resistant strains, farmers spray more weedkillers. It’s an arms race.


Despite an ongoing debate about the effects of glyphosate, experts agree that it’s relatively benign. Benbrook has called it one of the safest herbicides on the market. He concludes: “In light of its generally favorable environmental and toxicological properties, especially compared to some of the herbicides displaced by glyphosate, the dramatic increase in glyphosate use has likely not markedly increased human health risks.”


But the arms race could change that. As weeds evolve to withstand Roundup, farmers are deploying other, more worrisome herbicides. And companies are engineering crops to withstand these herbicides so that farmers can spray them freely.

Chipotle complains that GMOs “produce pesticides” and “create herbicide resistant super-weeds.” The company says Benbrook’s study showed that “pesticide and herbicide use increased by more than 400 million pounds as a result of GMO cultivation.” (Chipotle, unlike Benbrook and other experts, uses the term pesticide to mean insecticide.)

But this is misleading in two ways. First, by pooling the data, Chipotle has hidden half of what Benbrook found: that Bt crops reduced insecticide use and thereby, in terms of their contribution to the bottom line, reduced the combined use of pest-killing chemicals. And second, the problem that’s driving the herbicide arms race isn’t genetic engineering. It’s monoculture.

Everyone who has studied the problem carefully—Benbrook, the USDA, the National Research Council—comes to the same conclusion: By relying too much on one method of weed control, we’ve helped weeds evolve to defeat it.

To confound evolution, you have to make evolutionary pressures less predictable. That means switching herbicides so weeds that develop resistance to one herbicide will be killed by another. It also means alternating crops, so weeds have to compete with different plants and grow under different tilling, watering, and harvest conditions.

Industry and regulators, belatedly, are beginning to address this problem. As part of its product approval and renewal process, the EPA, backed by the USDA, is requiring producers of herbicides and herbicide-tolerant crops to monitor and report use of their chemicals, work with farmers to control excessive use, and promote non-herbicidal weed control methods.


GMOs are part of the problem. Herbicide-tolerant crops let farmers spray weedkillers more often and more thoroughly without harming their crops. It’s no accident that Monsanto, which sells Roundup-ready seeds, also sells Roundup.

But GMOs didn’t invent monoculture, and banning them won’t make it go away. Farmers have been cultivating homogeneity for millennia. Roundup has been used for more than 40 years.

Chipotle illustrates the folly of renouncing GMOs in the name of herbicide control. According to its new policy, “All corn-based ingredients in Chipotle’s food that formerly may have been genetically modified have been removed or replaced with non-GMO versions, while all soy-derived ingredients that may have been genetically modified were replaced with alternatives, such as rice bran oil and sunflower oil.”

But shifting to sunflower oil is demonstrably counterproductive. As NPR’s Dan Charles points out, “many sunflower varieties, while not genetically modified, also are herbicide-tolerant. They were bred to tolerate a class of herbicides called ALS inhibitors. And since farmers start[ed] relying on those herbicides, many weeds have evolved resistance to them. In fact, many more weeds have become resistant to ALS inhibitors than to glyphosate.”


That’s just one example of how tricky it is to assess the effects of swearing off GMOs. Roundup isn’t the only herbicide, genetic engineering isn’t the only technology that creates herbicide tolerance, and your health (which is no more likely to be affected by a given herbicide in GE food than in non-GE food) is just one of many factors to consider.

To judge the environmental wisdom of switching from a GMO to a non-GMO product, you’d have to know which pesticides each product involves and how those pesticides affect species that live where the crops are grown. None of that is on the label.

You’d also have to consider the environmental benefits of agricultural efficiency. By making cropland more productive, with less output lost to weeds and insects, GMOs reduce the amount of land that has to be farmed and the amount of water that’s wasted. Herbicide-tolerant crops even mitigate climate change by reducing the need to till fields, which erodes soil and releases greenhouse gases.


The more you learn about herbicide resistance, the more you come to understand how complicated the truth about GMOs is. First you discover that they aren’t evil. Then you learn that they aren’t perfectly innocent. Then you realize that nothing is perfectly innocent.

Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives. The least you can do is look past a three-letter label .


6 Better GMOs

Twenty years after the debut of genetically engineered food, it’s a travesty that the technology’s commercial applications are still so focused on old-fashioned weedkillers.

Greenpeace and Chipotle think the logical response to this travesty is to purge GMOs. They’re exactly wrong. The relentless efforts of Luddites to block testing, regulatory approval, and commercial development of GMOs are major reasons why more advanced GE products, such as Golden Rice, are still unavailable.

The best way to break the herbicide industry’s grip on genetic engineering is to support the technology and push it forward, by telling policymakers, food manufacturers, and seed companies that you want better GMOs.


The USDA’s catalog of recently engineered plants shows plenty of worthwhile options. The list includes drought-tolerant corn, virus-resistant plums, non-browning apples, potatoes with fewer natural toxins, and soybeans that produce less saturated fat. A recent global inventory by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization discusses other projects in the pipeline: virus-resistant beans, heat-tolerant sugarcane, salt-tolerant wheat, disease-resistant cassava, high-iron rice, and cotton that requires less nitrogen fertilizer.

Skim the news, and you’ll find scientists at work on more ambitious ideas: high-calcium carrots, antioxidant tomatoes, nonallergenic nuts, bacteria-resistant oranges, water-conserving wheat, corn and cassava loaded with extra nutrients, and a flaxlike plant that produces the healthy oil formerly available only in fish.


That’s what genetic engineering can do for health and for our planet. The reason it hasn’t is that we’ve been stuck in a stupid, wasteful fight over GMOs. On one side is an army of quacks and pseudo-environmentalists waging a leftist war on science. On the other side are corporate cowards who would rather stick to profitable weed-killing than invest in products that might offend a suspicious public.

The only way to end this fight is to educate ourselves and make it clear to everyone—European governments, trend-setting grocers, fad-hopping restaurant chains, research universities, and biotechnology investors—that we’re ready, as voters and consumers, to embrace nutritious, environmentally friendly food, no matter where it got its genes. We want our GMOs. Now, show us what you can do.

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